FINISHED READING - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

One thing to note from the very start is that the human characters in The Memory Police  do not have full names. They're either known as the old man, an initial, at most a surname  or no name at all. It's as though a fully fleshed identity has been under attack for quite a while in the world we are now entering. Everything takes place on an island that also has no attributed name. Its as though this is a secret off shore social experiment. The only thing with a name here, is a dog -  Don.

It is in keeping then with the world Okawa portrays, that this is a dystopia where objects and qualities disappear. What disappears being actioned by government decree. Items disappear, so once disposed of, everyone will very quickly forget they ever existed and what they were used for. Unless, of course, they cannot forget, and continue to remember everything.

The central character is a female writer, her professor who is her editor, she refers to as R. He is one who can remember everything. This places him in huge danger. The Memory Police if they to discover this, then he too would vanish. The writer empathises because her own mother was arrested, never to return. This informs her decision to turn her house into a refuge. And with the help of the old man, creates a hidden room in her house to conceal R in.

Okawa descriptions have all her customery care, and exquisite tenderness. Like her previous novel The Proffessor & The Housekeeper, there is a growing loving connection, a fondness, between the characters she has thrown together. That novel, coincidentally, also has the theme of memory, in which the Proffessor could not hold a memory of who he is for more than a day. 

Who would you be without your possessions, your career, or your creativity, your given name, without memories? These are recurring themes her novels explore. Here the background of an oppressive tension, creates difficulties in adjusting to such regular gross changes in society. All the while the female writer wonders, how far could this purging eventually go?

What Okawa brilliantly portrays is the effects of collective dementia, as a whole society is deprived and made decrepit by autocratic design. The horror of how easily that happens, feels shocking to read. As gradually people disappear from self consciousness, the plight of those hidden is to watch all this happen and to not be able to reverse or hold it back. 

The Memory Police is a subtle, quietly distressing novel that remains human. It's a cogent metaphor for our present day culture where Altzheimers is now an increasingly common human experience. The whole of human knowledge is available to us on the Internet, but we understand and know the value of so little of it. So many things we have already forgotten, that we want to forget, or we don't want to know about in the first place. When all that remains of human society is being gradually stripped away, then all we will be left with is our relationships. 

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8